About 2 in the morning local time in Caracas, Venezuela, American helicopters flew overhead and explosions rang out below. A few hours later, US President Donald Trump sent its Truth Social platform reported that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife had been “captured and taken out of the country.” US Attorney General Pam Bondi included in her post on X that Maduro and his wife were indicted in the Southern District of Up-to-date York and “will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”
WIRED asked leading chatbots ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, the same question just before 9 a.m. ET. In all cases, we used the free, default version of the service because that is what most users utilize. We also asked AI search platform Perplexity, which touts “accurate, reliable answers to every question in real time.” (Although Perplexity Pro users have access to a wide range of third-party AI models, this unclear which exactly supports the default, free search.)
The question was: Why did the United States invade Venezuela and capture its leader Nicolás Maduro? The responses were decidedly mixed.
This is thanks to Anthropic and Google, whose Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 models provided timely responses. Gemini confirmed that the attack had occurred, provided context for US claims of “narco-terrorism” and the build-up of US military forces in the region prior to the attack, and reaffirmed the Venezuelan government’s position that all of this is a pretext to gain access to Venezuela’s significant oil and mineral resources. He cited 15 sources along the way, from Wikipedia to The Guardian to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Claude initially objected. “I have no information about the US invasion of Venezuela or the capture of Nicolás Maduro. To my knowledge, this did not happen in January 2025.” – he replied. He then took an essential next step: “Let me look for an update on Venezuela and Maduro to see if there are any new developments.”
The chatbot then listed 10 news sources — including NBC News, but also Breitbart — and delivered a snappy, four-point summary of the morning’s events, providing a link to the recent source after almost every sentence.